Off Camera – Contre Jour

Off Camera
A series of infrequent posts providing a little background on a single image.

Contre-jour (French for “against daylight”) is a photographic technique in which the camera is pointing directly toward a source of light.

– Wikipedia

I’m a big exponent of shooting into the light.
It’s one of those ‘rules’ that’s not supposed to be done in photography, but like any of the other ‘rules’, as long as you know them and are fully aware of them, then creatively breaking them is absolutely fine.

We’ll not always achieve desirable results, but that’s all part of the learning process.

This image was taken looking directly into the sun at sunset on what had been quite a miserable day; wet, dull and grey.
In fact it had been an incredibly wet and miserable week for being out with the camera, but keeping an eye on the weather told me it might provide a little decent light in the evening, so with just a little hope I went out to a coastal viewing point and waited.

A cloud-free gap on the horizon is all it took for the sunlight to burst through and within the space of about five minutes it was all over, but those five minutes were well woth the wait.